While preparing dinner, I listened to a YouTube piece on forgotten one-hit wonders of 1977, and for the first time since the late 1970's I heard a snippet of the song "Heaven on the 7th Floor" by Paul Nicholas, a hit that was never a favorite of mine, but it was certainly memorable. When Nicholas's name was mentioned, it rang a bell in my memory, and upon mulling it over I went "Nooooo..." and ran to the internet to check on what was jogging my brain.
The films of director
Ken Russell are among my favorites for their sheer madness, and my
search revealed that my memory of Nicholas's name was correct. He has
prominent roles in two of my favorite Russell films, specifically TOMMY
and LISZTOMANIA (both 1975). I saw TOMMY in during its theatrical run
with my parents — notably, TOMMY was the final film we saw together as a
family unit — but that was two years before "Heaven on the 7th Floor,"
and I did not see LISZTOMANIA until I obtained a VHS copy during the
late 1980's, and when viewing both of those for the first time, I did
not not any of the actors' names, as situation that changed once I had
both films on home video and went on to study them in depth over the
next three decades.
Paul
Nicolas has a brief-but-unforgettable role in TOMMY as the gleefully
sadistic Cousin Kevin, complete with his own musical number that drags
the audience along as Kevin spends a day torturing the deaf/dumb/blind
titular character.
But
my favorite of his Russell performances is in LISZTOMANIA, where he has
an ogoing and significant part throughout the film as composer/German
nationalist Richard Wagner. It's an incredibly loopy and cartoonish
portrayal that finds Wagner undergoing numerous visual changes to
indicate his growing fascistic nationalism, among which are him becoming
a vampire to leech off of composer Franz Liszt's music, only to be
reborn in the 20th Century as a literal chimera of Frankenstein's
monster and Adolph Hitler.
As Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler in LISZTOMANIA (1975).
The
insane sight of a Frankenstein/Wagner/Hitler leading female children
clad in cheesy Superman costumes (symbolizing the indoctrination of the
German youth into the ideology of the Aryan superman) as he stiffly
marches through a town, blasting fleeing orthodox Jews with an electric
guitar machine gun made my jaw hit the floor when I first saw the film,
and that image's audacity and sheer lunacy cracks me up to this day.
So, yeah, that was the guy who sang "Heaven on the 7th Floor."
